


Perfectly Rainy Day for Mario Kart

by RiiThing



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, It’s all fun and games till you bring Mario Kart into your story, Mario Kart, References to Depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-20
Updated: 2019-01-20
Packaged: 2019-10-05 15:25:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17327543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RiiThing/pseuds/RiiThing
Summary: The only place safe from it all was the horizon, the gold-washed sea with the sunset and glitter and distance unreachable to the rain. Hanzo wished he could drown there.—-Also known as that one story where the Shimada bros play Mario Kart and it still manages to be angsty.





	Perfectly Rainy Day for Mario Kart

The air was grey and rainy. That rain and grey slashed the rocks of Gibraltar, beat the roofs of the headquarters and brushed its windows like it knew nothing else. The only place safe from it all was the horizon, the gold-washed sea with the sunset and glitter and distance unreachable to the rain. Hanzo wished he could drown there.

He was soaking wet. The wall he had chosen hid all the stares and curiosity - not that many stayed outside in a weather like this, let alone looked for him, for it to truly matter -, yet would let the sky cry its worst on him. It made drinking a desperate display, but then again, his bottle of rum had been empty for a while now. Rum, since sake had ran out.

How had it all begun? He couldn’t remember. He didn’t need reasons to sulk in the rain anyway.

“Hanzo?”

Hanzo’s eyes winced wide open. No, it still wasn’t a dream, the world wasn’t that out of it. The voice belonged to Genji.

Genji crept to Hanzo’s sight from some foggy other-world and remained at the edge of it. Hanzo didn’t want to look straight at him, couldn’t, if for nothing else than the red of his cheeks and the fury in his heart.

“Here you are, alone in the rain?” Genji chuckled, _chuckled_ , clearly, but it didn’t ring with happiness. Or maybe Hanzo thought into it too much. Oh, how he wished to not think at all.

Hanzo realized he didn’t answer. He straightened himself, just as it was proper.

“Here I am,” he ended up muttering, with as much energy as he could. Genji came closer, and as he did, Hanzo found a small, rising anguish within himself. “But it’s not what it looks like.”

A lie. He couldn’t do else.

Genji was silent, maybe thinking, maybe passing judgments on the worst. Hanzo wished he’d leave.

Instead, Genji settled and sat down next to his brother. Hanzo, with a bit of a lag, remembered his bottle and shiftily hid it close to his side, under the cover of his jacket. The only one who needed to trouble their heads with a little matter like that was Hanzo himself.

A silence was born, a determined one, if he was to describe it. The gold of the sunset accompanied it.

Something was reached out to him. Hanzo’s eyes ran briefly on the handed item before retreating to Genji.

“It’s a 3DS,” Genji explained. “One of the older Nintendo’s handheld consoles. Reinhardt found them. I thought we could play Mario Kart.”

Mario Kart. In the rain. On a moment like this.

Uncertainty told Hanzo to look for his brother’s eyes, but the only thing looking him back was a visor with a faint green glow. Something in Hanzo’s chest stung and he turned back to the object. He took it.

They inched closer to the wall, where the rain didn’t punish them the same way as merely few feet further, and Genji flung open his own handheld. Hanzo wasn’t quite sure what he was supposed to do.

“It’s a bit different than the latest models,” Genji told him as he slid his hand through Hanzo’s arms to the side of his console, “it goes on from here. The games are already in, you have a card version.”

He didn’t play as a child, no, unless Genji so requested. He didn’t have the guts to say that he wasn’t entirely sure what a card version meant, or that he didn’t know enough about the newest models to compare them even to the decade old versions, or that he barely remembered how to play Mario Kart in the first place. He was almost taken by a surprise with just managing to open the game itself.

Hanzo had to have disappeared somewhere into his mind for a moment, as his sight sharpened again only after the character selection clinked to the screen. And as it so did, oh, he was not ready for the huge, heavy boulder tumbling down to his stomach.

The menu looked older and different and the cast was smaller, but it was still _familiar_. It could have very well been _the_ game that Genji pulled out on a bad weather or after a harsh lesson or at the end of an unpleasant meeting, for all he knew, the moment hold twice its weight anyway.

Hanzo shook himself back to earth. he picked his character, picked his car, and pressed A. The first of these things made Genji chuckle with that metallic tone that still made Hanzo’s heart shatter.

“You always did choose Yoshi, didn’t you,” his brother remarked. Yoshi smiled to Hanzo’s empty stare. “Some things simply never change, now do they?”

Genji said it with a smile in his voice, yet nothing but sorrow dug itself to the other.

_Some things just never changed._

They proceeded into the actual playing, and for Hanzo’s surprise, the game was much easier to relearn than he had feared. So many of the forgotten skills came back to his hands like water flowed to streams, there was a bit of a hassle with the power-ups first but he got the hang of them rather quickly, and the rules and the procedures had already rooted themselves into him before the beginning of the first round. He might have even been a little bit proud of himself.

“It’s like riding a bike,” Genji said.

“Once you learn it, you never forget it. This is a talent picked by the memory of your fingertips, not by the muscle of your brain.”

At that very moment, Hanzo erred to to look at his brother. The man’s chest, hard and lifeless and metallic, gleamed with the light of his handheld, his legs were a mere slide to the pouring rain, there was no faces in his mask or in his body or in _anything_. There was no him. Not in the same way as before.

As if stove-burned, Hanzo’s eyes wavered away. How much memory had his brother seen slipping by his very hands?

Genji won the first round. And the second round. And the round after that. On each victory he laughed and congratulated Hanzo for whatever low-ranking spot he happened to find himself at, and for that alone, eventually, Hanzo couldn’t help but feel a tad better.

At times, Hanzo saw metal with his side eye and he remembered who he was, felt twisting in his stomach and pain in his chest. Sometimes he forgot what had happened a mere moment ago. Genji’s voice would wake him back to the race and he would almost, almost, believe they were back in Hanamura, playing games at the backstreet of the conference building after a stressful meeting.

Once he laughed.

They had played one, maybe two sets of four-round games, when Genji announced that his favorite roads would come up in the next levels. That, Hanzo knew, could only mean one of the most horrible things Genji had ever put him to play through.

The first stage, fortunately, was just a jungle. With some miraculous luck, Hanzo managed to climb all the way to the fourth place, a feat that made Genji almost burst with joy, but the bad luck and lackluster skill made a speedy return when the ice world stepped in. Apparently Genji didn’t hate it as much as he used to, to make things worst, even when losing his first place to a gorilla. Third one was a castle, Hanzo managed to get lost in there.

The fourth was Rainbow Road.

“I hate you,” Hanzo muttered, as if his mouth had decided to fire that cursed sentence before any concrete thoughts. Genji just laughed, tinkled.

“I love you too, my dearest brother,” he rejoiced. A small twinkle of a smile pushed itself to Hanzo’s face.

Hanzo, of course, came last. Something about the non-existent railings and the ramps and the fact that it was the _rainbow road_ , the gaming nightmare of his childhood, had still yet to do any favors for him.

Yet, he was happy.

Frustrated, but happy. Genji laughed to his failures, comforted at times, won him at every round; It was home.

It ended when the game came to a halt and Genji closed his console, and as it did, guilt noticed Hanzo’s smile and crept to wipe it off. Just as it should.

The sun had settled down or fallen behind the rain clouds that now curved above the water. Genji gazed at it, Hanzo stared at his screen.

“Thank you for playing with me,” Genji said. “I had fun.”

 _I had fun as well_ , Hanzo thought, before shaking his mental head and pushing the thought deep into his own darkness. A sharp no echoed in his mind.

He heard shifting and his brother moved closer, and it took all the willpower for Hanzo not to turn to look.

“You can keep it. Reinhardt’s permission. It doesn’t seem like the real owners have been missing these terribly lot.”

“Hm.”

What followed was a silence, in which Genji did not rise and go away. Hanzo became awfully aware of the rain, of the upcoming night, of his own overthinking mind.

_Some things just never changed._

“Listen…” It took two heartbeats for Genji to continue. “Do you want to talk about that?”

About that? What that? Hanzo had to bring his stare to Genji to receive any kind of a hint at all, only to freeze to place. His visor was gone. Brown eyes looked back.

“Your bottle, Hanzo. Brandy?”

“…Rum.”

“Ah.”

Hanzo had completely forgotten about his drink. There was no hiding it anymore, but he still pressed it harder against his side.

“Is it a problem?” Genji continued. Hanzo no longer had the gull to look at his brother’s eyes - _Genji’s, oh, his Genji’s eyes_ -, so he lowered his gaze to the ground between them and kept his thoughts in the dirt.

“I’m not drunk,” he managed to say. It was easier than wording anything else.

Genji’s look didn’t leave him, that much Hanzo could feel, could see it in the shadows and hear it in his stillness. He spoke, after a short while.

“You know how father was during his later years,” he blunted- carefully, if such thing can be done with care- and something in Hanzo’s heart twitched again, startled him, brought memories and pains he didn’t want to remember.

Oh, he knew.

“I believe you see the reason for my worries.”

“I’m not our father. Alcohol doesn’t have a rule over me. And don’t you try to pretend you never drank yourself.”

“Not for sadness, Hanzo.”

It was like Hanzo had been hit by an icicle.

The rain whipped yet the world fell silent, the mind drove hundreds of hectares but the body was numb, till the cracked wall patched itself and decided that he was fine.

“I don’t…”

Yet the words refused to come. They tried, surely did, only nothing but an odd splash ever sprung out. His eyes ached, his chest grew cool, he could do nothing but to drop his forehead for the embrace of his hands and look at the sea.

He listened the rain and his brother’s stillness. He listened it long, feared his own self breaking, feared the slits that teared his skin apart. Feared to think. Feared all sorts of things.

A hand pressed to Hanzo’s shoulder, with coldness of the evening chill that even the fabric couldn’t stop.

“If you feel like it, we can talk. Or you can write me a note. Or you could go to Angela, or to anyone who would listen.”

Hanzo’s eyes stayed at the sea.

The hand pulled away and Genji stood up. The visor clicked back to its place and Hanzo had the courage to once again look at his brown-eyeless brother.

“Let’s play again sometime, shall we?”

Genji suggested, for which Hanzo gave an absent nod. He couldn’t do much else.

Genji turned to the sea. The darkness of the evening night had fallen upon them completely and the clouds hid the moon, but Hanzo’s open game and the green lights of Genji’s body shimmered their best. For a moment longer, at least.

“Would you like to come back inside with me? Freezing here would most likely not be wise,” Genji suggested, and once again there was an ounce of that familiar mirth in his voice. Hanzo relaxed just as much.

“Later,” he decided rather quickly. Genji was still for a moment, but nodded eventually.

“Alright then. See you.”

Genji disappeared just as shiftily as he had came, somewhere far away from Hanzo’s clarity. The darkness and the voids took back their rightful grip of Gibraltar and left behind nothing but a lump of a man, a dollop of confusion and smell of rum, and that dollop could do nothing but stare at the white of his handheld’s screen like it was the only light in his life.

**Author's Note:**

> I just wanted to make something with the brothers suffering through Rainbow Road just as much as I did and then it turned into this


End file.
